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Tuesday, 19 July 2011

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Should Be Required Reading for Teens

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish where bloggers make lists about books and other suitably bookish things. This week we're doing books we think should be required reading for teens! :D

1. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. The book is amazing, and I think it's important for teens to understand rape and how it can affect someone better, plus the poem at the beginning of the 10th anniversary edition is just awesome.

2. Shakespeare. Preferably, the funny ones (because they're my favourite) Yes, I'm a teenager, I like Shakespeare. But I think always doing Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet and all the serious ones can put people off. Plus if we did The Taming of the Shrew we could watch 10 Things I Hate About You and I LOVE that film ;p

3. Fairy tales. I don't mid which fairy tales, Grimms, Andersen's, whoevers, doesn't matter. But we never read fairy tales in school, especially in high school, and it'd be nice to intersperse all the serious classics with some fairy tales sometimes ;)

4. Pride & Prejudice. Right, I know this book doesn't have any moral message or is educational or anything, but we never seem to do the fun books. And I think we would be more eager to read classics if they were sarcastic rom coms rather than serious melodramatic political stories. Or at least the girls would...

5. Stolen by Lucy Christopher. I love this book, and I think it'd be a really interesting one to read in class. It'd be interesting to see how other people related to the book and Gemma and Ty's relationship.

6. Edgar Allen Poe. Sorry, I had to, I love Edgar Allen Poe and in the UK we never look at anything of is, not even The Raven, and I think that some of his short stories would be cool to do.

7. The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson. 'Kay so I might just be putting this in here because I love the heck out of this book and because I'm running out of ideas, but I think it'd be good to link literature and poetry in this way. Plus, it's just a good book and the writing is stunning.

Those are all I can think of this week! (I know, some of them aren't great.. ;p) What did you have?

That's a good point about reading some "fun books" now and then! And doesn't it seem as if only Shakespeare's Tragedies and Histories get read in schools? When I was a teacher, I assigned A Midsummer Night's Dream and my students really liked it . . . though not as much as The Importance of Being Earnest, which is even lighter and funnier! =)

And I'm behind you on faerie tales (although I'd put mythology first on the syllabus). It seems as if the only versions anyone remembers are the Disney adaptations--which is really sad when you consider how many liberties the animators take! I agree that any folk literature--whether mythology or faerie tales or even fables--are just as important to one's "literary vocabulary" as the longer Great Books.